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Void
Insurance worker Robert Samson wakes one morning to find the entire world outside his home has vanished overnight, leaving his house suspended in the middle of a vast, dark, featureless void.
With limited tools at his disposal, he sets about examining the void and his place within it, trying to explain its sudden, mysterious appearance. Meanwhile, his total solitude causes him to start looking back on his life, especially the traumatic fallout of a childhood incident involving a young girl named Rainey Day.
Utterly alone, with food and water supplies that are dwindling rapidly, can he find a way out of the void before he loses his mind – or even his life?
With limited tools at his disposal, he sets about examining the void and his place within it, trying to explain its sudden, mysterious appearance. Meanwhile, his total solitude causes him to start looking back on his life, especially the traumatic fallout of a childhood incident involving a young girl named Rainey Day.
Utterly alone, with food and water supplies that are dwindling rapidly, can he find a way out of the void before he loses his mind – or even his life?
- GenresScience Fiction
150 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 19, 2016
9 people are currently reading
93 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 1, 2017
It certainly isn’t everyday that one comes across a book that was basically described in a work of fiction written half a century ago. But with this book I have come the closest that I shall probably ever come.
I think that this is probably the best novel i have read all year. But I have to agree with a lady called Greta, who is the only other person on Good Reads to have reviewed it so far when she says that she has no idea what it is all about. She speculated that it could be about redemption, faith or belief. I wouldn’t even go that far. But it certainly is unforgettable.
I will pass you over to the publisher, who I suspect is probably also the author, for their/his blurb, in order to set the scene:
“Insurance worker Robert Samson wakes one morning to find the entire world outside his home has vanished overnight, leaving his house suspended in the middle of a vast, dark, featureless void. With limited tools at his disposal, he sets about examining the void and his place within it, trying to explain its sudden, mysterious appearance. Meanwhile, his total solitude causes him to start looking back on his life, especially the traumatic fallout of a childhood incident involving a young girl named Rainey Day.
Utterly alone, with food and water supplies that are dwindling rapidly, can he find a way out of the void before he loses his mind – or even his life?”
Back in the late 1979s or early 1980s the BBC broadcast a rather good adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. I was a punky little herbert at the time, and would probably have never paid it any attention if my Mother hadn’t refused to watch it because she wouldn’t believe the upper classes could ever behave in such a manner. A year or so later, by the way, she refused to watch Brideshead Revisited because she didn’t believe that the Upper Classes would ever indulge in anything so vulgar as homosexuality. oscar Wilde was a foreigner, after all. But I digress.
As a result of my Mama’s disdain, I watched and enjoyed the BBCs adaptation of the two Mitford books, and went out and got them out from the library the ver next weekend. I was an immediate fan, and Uncle Matthew joined the literary depiction of Lawrence Durrell as a young man as portrayed by his younger brother, as templates for what I wanted to be as I grew up. Add a smidgeon of Jubal Harshaw, and I think that I have pretty well got there, but that is another story and I am in danger of digressing again.
In the first of Nancy Mitford’s brace of books describing a fictionalised account of her life as one of the culturally notorious Mitford Sisters, one of the minor, but still memorable characters is Captain Davey Warbeck (apparently based in a notoriously eccentric relative, Cdr Geoffrey Bowles) who married the aunt of the main narrator and protagonist of the book. Amingst other things, Warbeck is an author who - amongst other things - wrote a novel about the final days of an Antarctic explorer stranded alone in a hut on the vast southern continent knowing full well that how ever frugally he metes out his supplies, he will not live long enough to see the arrival of his rescuers.
Now, Nancy Mitford obviously thought that this was a massively funny satire on the pretensions of the literary avant-garde if the 1930s, but I thought then (and think now) that it is a fuck off clever idea for a first person novel. And I wondered then, as I wonder now, why nobody ever went out and write the thing. And now somebody has. Or at least as near as dammit.
Whatever the philosophical message behind this quasi-absurdist novel may be, and here I come very close to repeating my favourite quote from Mark Twain about people looking for a novel being shot, this is a story about a man falling apart. And then building himself up again. He actually deals with the immediate aftermath of his dilemma very well, but once the reality of his predicament hits him, things slowly but inexorably change. As Davey Warbeck’s novel never existed outside whatever axis of the Burroughs Time Twister contains the Worlds of/as Myth, one cannot actually do any fact checking here, but one can imagine his unnamed hero spending weeks contemplating the reality if being forced to drink his own urine in order to survive (although, come to think of it, in Antarctica there would actually be no shortage of water, albeit frozen, so it probably wouldn’t come to that) but one can imagine the hypochondriac Davey writing reams of prose in which he contemplated such a horrifically uncivilised lifestyle option.
At first Samson is phlegmatic about his plight, even enjoying it as he discovers new realms of self reliance that he never knew he had. After all, he thinks, he might be a middle aged man with no life partner and a collection of utterly pointless and very expensive collectible man toys. But he is dealing with this utterly horrific eventuality, and dealing with it rather well. Fuck, he can still make cocktails, he has a lot of stored electricity in batteries, and even goes outside to explore. But slowly the electricity runs out, he us left in darkness, and realises that every time he gets drunk he dehydrates himself and ends up using up more of his precious reserves of water, and the end that he so desperately wants to avoid gets closer.
At the end, when he has run out if water and his kidneys are failing to the extent that he can no longer produce enough urine to mix with the juice from his tinned peaches (the thought of that is so revolting that I truly wish to change the subject) and his collections of overpriced sci fi collectible tat have long since been thrown out into the endless night, either out of rage or emancipation (one is never quite sure) he takes a leap of faith. And……
Fuck. I am not even going to attempt to describe what happens next. If I was going to be like that twat who almost destroyed Bruce Springsteen’s career 43 years ago, I would say that “I have seen the future of one specific genre of peculiar absurdist literature, and his name is NATHAN”, but that would be vulgar, and unlike Jon Landau, in my family vulgarity never begins at home.
So read the fucking book. You can get it for free on Kindle Unlimited, and even if you have to pay for it, I truly think that you should.
Ta ta.
I think that this is probably the best novel i have read all year. But I have to agree with a lady called Greta, who is the only other person on Good Reads to have reviewed it so far when she says that she has no idea what it is all about. She speculated that it could be about redemption, faith or belief. I wouldn’t even go that far. But it certainly is unforgettable.
I will pass you over to the publisher, who I suspect is probably also the author, for their/his blurb, in order to set the scene:
“Insurance worker Robert Samson wakes one morning to find the entire world outside his home has vanished overnight, leaving his house suspended in the middle of a vast, dark, featureless void. With limited tools at his disposal, he sets about examining the void and his place within it, trying to explain its sudden, mysterious appearance. Meanwhile, his total solitude causes him to start looking back on his life, especially the traumatic fallout of a childhood incident involving a young girl named Rainey Day.
Utterly alone, with food and water supplies that are dwindling rapidly, can he find a way out of the void before he loses his mind – or even his life?”
Back in the late 1979s or early 1980s the BBC broadcast a rather good adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. I was a punky little herbert at the time, and would probably have never paid it any attention if my Mother hadn’t refused to watch it because she wouldn’t believe the upper classes could ever behave in such a manner. A year or so later, by the way, she refused to watch Brideshead Revisited because she didn’t believe that the Upper Classes would ever indulge in anything so vulgar as homosexuality. oscar Wilde was a foreigner, after all. But I digress.
As a result of my Mama’s disdain, I watched and enjoyed the BBCs adaptation of the two Mitford books, and went out and got them out from the library the ver next weekend. I was an immediate fan, and Uncle Matthew joined the literary depiction of Lawrence Durrell as a young man as portrayed by his younger brother, as templates for what I wanted to be as I grew up. Add a smidgeon of Jubal Harshaw, and I think that I have pretty well got there, but that is another story and I am in danger of digressing again.
In the first of Nancy Mitford’s brace of books describing a fictionalised account of her life as one of the culturally notorious Mitford Sisters, one of the minor, but still memorable characters is Captain Davey Warbeck (apparently based in a notoriously eccentric relative, Cdr Geoffrey Bowles) who married the aunt of the main narrator and protagonist of the book. Amingst other things, Warbeck is an author who - amongst other things - wrote a novel about the final days of an Antarctic explorer stranded alone in a hut on the vast southern continent knowing full well that how ever frugally he metes out his supplies, he will not live long enough to see the arrival of his rescuers.
Now, Nancy Mitford obviously thought that this was a massively funny satire on the pretensions of the literary avant-garde if the 1930s, but I thought then (and think now) that it is a fuck off clever idea for a first person novel. And I wondered then, as I wonder now, why nobody ever went out and write the thing. And now somebody has. Or at least as near as dammit.
Whatever the philosophical message behind this quasi-absurdist novel may be, and here I come very close to repeating my favourite quote from Mark Twain about people looking for a novel being shot, this is a story about a man falling apart. And then building himself up again. He actually deals with the immediate aftermath of his dilemma very well, but once the reality of his predicament hits him, things slowly but inexorably change. As Davey Warbeck’s novel never existed outside whatever axis of the Burroughs Time Twister contains the Worlds of/as Myth, one cannot actually do any fact checking here, but one can imagine his unnamed hero spending weeks contemplating the reality if being forced to drink his own urine in order to survive (although, come to think of it, in Antarctica there would actually be no shortage of water, albeit frozen, so it probably wouldn’t come to that) but one can imagine the hypochondriac Davey writing reams of prose in which he contemplated such a horrifically uncivilised lifestyle option.
At first Samson is phlegmatic about his plight, even enjoying it as he discovers new realms of self reliance that he never knew he had. After all, he thinks, he might be a middle aged man with no life partner and a collection of utterly pointless and very expensive collectible man toys. But he is dealing with this utterly horrific eventuality, and dealing with it rather well. Fuck, he can still make cocktails, he has a lot of stored electricity in batteries, and even goes outside to explore. But slowly the electricity runs out, he us left in darkness, and realises that every time he gets drunk he dehydrates himself and ends up using up more of his precious reserves of water, and the end that he so desperately wants to avoid gets closer.
At the end, when he has run out if water and his kidneys are failing to the extent that he can no longer produce enough urine to mix with the juice from his tinned peaches (the thought of that is so revolting that I truly wish to change the subject) and his collections of overpriced sci fi collectible tat have long since been thrown out into the endless night, either out of rage or emancipation (one is never quite sure) he takes a leap of faith. And……
Fuck. I am not even going to attempt to describe what happens next. If I was going to be like that twat who almost destroyed Bruce Springsteen’s career 43 years ago, I would say that “I have seen the future of one specific genre of peculiar absurdist literature, and his name is NATHAN”, but that would be vulgar, and unlike Jon Landau, in my family vulgarity never begins at home.
So read the fucking book. You can get it for free on Kindle Unlimited, and even if you have to pay for it, I truly think that you should.
Ta ta.
November 21, 2019
Well that was weird? Reminds me, to an extent, of TV shows which are a great idea but the writers have no idea how to end it and it just ends in the manner of a damp squib. Was enjoying it at first but the latter half of this short novel was annoying leading to a non ending. Not sure if I loved this or hated this, hence the three star rating. One thing is for sure, I will never read it again.
Ray Smillie
Ray Smillie
March 30, 2017
Thoroughly enjoyable
....but had no idea what it was about,redemption,forgiveness,or belief? Not a clue, but certainly original, innovative, creepy and utterly compelling.
....but had no idea what it was about,redemption,forgiveness,or belief? Not a clue, but certainly original, innovative, creepy and utterly compelling.
October 9, 2024
This review is unlike my other reviews, just as a single performer on stage in a one-person show is a different kind of play. This is the story of a single man who has the impossible happen to him, what he does to escape it or survive it, and how he comes to the realization of it. How he comes to terms with his life and what he would do if he woke up with his life restored. It is more of a thought exercise written down into a story.
There is not a lot of physical world-building because there is not a lot of the world to build. The ethereal world-building is personal to the MMC. There is no character interaction, as there is only one character. The history of the MMC comes out through the story.
The adventure into the Void is not your typical science fiction story, but it has absurdist, horror, and psychological aspects to it. I give this twisted tale four stars out of five stars.
There is not a lot of physical world-building because there is not a lot of the world to build. The ethereal world-building is personal to the MMC. There is no character interaction, as there is only one character. The history of the MMC comes out through the story.
The adventure into the Void is not your typical science fiction story, but it has absurdist, horror, and psychological aspects to it. I give this twisted tale four stars out of five stars.
May 30, 2024
I had a hard time with this one. It was well written but I found myself skimming in places. You can only describe the void in so many ways. Also, I found his inner dialogue boring. I'm not sure what the author's intention was when writing this story, and I'm not sure what exactly I took away from it. It was definitely different from other works that I have read that fall into this genre.
August 9, 2024
This book starts with an impossible scenario, and starts very slowly. The main character is just not very interesting and there’s no hook for the reader. I read 10% and couldn’t make myself go further.
April 4, 2024
Void is pure delight. First, the grammar and punctuation are spot on, as are the proper use of pronouns, all vital aspects of good writing which are sorely wanting in writing these days. The vocabulary is very sophisticated and adds great color to the story. The premise is one I have never seen before, and I have read hundreds and hundreds of fiction books over my lifetime. For an author to present a unique story idea is a rare event. Our poor protagonist faces the most dire of fates...sudden, unexplained isolation from everything in existence. There were moments when I was quite uncomfortable with the MC's internal struggles, and dialogs, but that only spurred me on to find out his fate. His journey of solitude elicits an ever deepening soul searching exploration of what and who he is, and his thoughts and conclusions are relevant for all of us. I read Void in one sitting, unable to put it down.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews